Demonic DVD Review

4 stars for this well thought out and executed horror film.

Following its European premiere at Film4 FrightFest, Demonic is now available to own on DVD.

Directed by Will Canon (Brotherhood) and produced by James Wan (Saw, Insidious: Chapter 2, The Conjuring), Demonic is an innovative and exciting film, combining found footage and traditional filming techniques in a modern blend which adds nicely to the scare factor.

The story follows a fairly standard formula, at least at the start. Detective Mark Lewis (Frank Grillo – Warrior, Captain America: The Winter Soldier) receives a call sending him to a disturbance in the local area. What he finds there is most disturbing, the dead bodies of three college students and one still alive but slightly hysterical teenage boy, John (Dustin Milligan – Slither, Repeaters) who tells him that there are also two people missing, his pregnant girlfriend Michelle (Cody Horn – End of Watch, Magic Mike) and her ex-boyfriend Bryan (Scott Mechlowicz – Eurotrip, Peaceful Warrior).

We then cut back to one week previously, as we see how they came to find themselves in this predicament. John has been having visions of his mother, who unbeknownst to the rest of the party was the only survivor of a mass murder at the house twenty years before, known as the Martha Livingstone murders. She went mad during a seance at the property, killed all her friends and then herself.

Bryan is fascinated by this and so they assemble a crack team of ghost hunters to head off to the house and try to find some answers (great idea, right?). Along on this venture are his girlfriend, Bryan, Donnie (Aaron Yu – 21, disturbia), Jules (Megan Park – Diary of the Dead), and Michelle’s brother Sam (Alex Goode).

Back at the house, Detective Lewis is trying to piece together events, but nothing seems to add up, and John’s tales of possession and demonic influence seem to be far fetched in the absence of any evidence. He calls in his girlfriend, Dr. Elizabeth Klein (Mario Bello – A History Of Violence), the department psychologist, to help with his enquiries and try to make some sense out of what John is telling them.

The rest of the film is very cleverly put together, as we switch between the events leading up to the deaths, the police investigation and the footage from all the cameras that the ghost hunters set up around the house, which became scrambled but are gradually decoded over the course of the film and the desperate search to find Michelle before it’s too late.

There is very clever use of the found footage elements, not too much, but just enough to allow for plenty of jump scares and up close and personal views of the killing action, filmed through a pair of camera glasses worn by the killer.

The acting is very good, I think there might be a few names to look out for here and the script works really well. There are several interesting and very surprising plot twists and it is a most enjoyable watch. Thoroughly recommended.

“The house did something to them? That’s not going to hold up in a court of law John. They don’t usually convict houses in the state of Louisiana.”

Demonic is available to buy on DVD from 07th Sept 2015